GOP ignores veto threat, passes student loan bill

Republicans have ignored a White House veto threat and passed a bill to keep interest rates on millions of federal student loans from doubling this summer.

The House approved the bill Friday on a 215-195 vote, despite pressure from conservative groups.

The election-year bill has evolved from a dispute over helping students into a battle between the two parties over how to help families cope with the weak job market and ailing economy.

The White House and most Democrats opposed the $5.9 billion bill because of how Republicans covered the costs: eliminating a preventive health care fund in President Barack Obama’s health care law. They say the program mostly benefits women, while Republicans call it a loosely controlled slush fund.

2. That is exactly what I am afraid of. There is this though

Even if the House bill passes as expected, it seems certain to go nowhere in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Senate Democrats have a bill of their own extending the lower interest rate and paid for by boosting payroll taxes paid by high-earning owners of some private firms. Republicans oppose it.

9. The Senate left on a week break today, so the senate won't have a new vote anytime soon n/t

14. Unless they want to kill it, it will go to Committee Hell.

Not one Republican-authored bill of substance has passed in Congress since the Republicans began their obstruction plan in earnest in late 2010.

This bill will die in the same way a thousand others have and will: it will be sent to a Democratically-controlled Committee in the Senate and the Chair of that Committee will ensure that the bill remains "under consideration" until this Congress ends in January, 2013.

If we wish to be exceptionally cruel to the Republicans, Democratic Senators can re-write the bill in Committee to include something they don't like, such as increased assistance to impoverished and minority students--pretty much anything kind or helpful--and then force Republican Senators to filibuster it or vote against it.

Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate are now working at cross-purposes. House Republicans need to churn out as much hateful garbage as they can, to placate their frothing backers in individual districts. Senate Republicans need to turn away from hateful garbage, lest they be swept under by the Obama reelection wave. But it is Democratic Senators who get to decide whether or not Republican Senators vote on a particular bill.

Now we have saved up an eighteen-month backlog of terribly written, hate-filled legislation courtesy of teabaggers in the House, and we can force Republican Senators to vote on a never-ending parade of those shitty bills without fear that any of them will become law (even if one sneaks by in a Senate vote, the President will simply veto it).

15. He hasn't had to veto anything.

Bad legislation had to get past Harry Reid in the Senate, first. Not a single Republican bill has exited the Senate this Congress, and the President and the Senate leadership generally agree on the legislation they can pass.

So the President has had no bills to veto since 2010. The threats, however, worked wonders, because anything he threatened to veto rarely even made it to a Senate floor vote.